“We have something we need to deliver on”

The doors opened at 6 p.m. for the Cleveland Cavaliers’ annual Wine and Gold United meeting for season ticketholders at the Cleveland Convention Center last Wednesday night. At about 6:30, I  — not a season ticketholder, but a friend of one — got in a very long line for the complimentary apparel package for official W&GU members.¹ (As I lacked official credentials, I tragically wasn’t eligible for any caps or pullovers.) We advanced maybe 150 feet in 15 minutes, still a few first downs short of the free merch table. We shuffled closer, closer, closer, when one of our party looked up from his phone and said, “Tristan signed.”

My immediate thought? BS; he’s having a laugh. But then:

#Cavs, Tristan Thompson agree to 5-year, $82 million deal, league sources tell @clevelanddotcom.

— Chris Haynes (@ChrisBHaynes) October 21, 2015

It’s real. Tristan’s back. We can stop worrying about it. Every single important player from last year’s team is back, plus a couple more that should help the cause. The Cavs are far from healthy, but they’re also far from the games that will determine how this team is remembered. As the franchise’s decision makers — owner Dan Gilbert, GM David Griffin, CEO Len Komoroski, and vice chairman Nate Forbes² — put it during their panel discussion Wednesday night, they wanted to put the band back together.

I suppose they weren’t the first to come up with that idea.

Fans were encouraged to take their seats around 7 p.m., moments after the Tristan news broke. You could see the good word spreading across the floor. The room now had reason to buzz. Were it not for the Tristan signing, I’m not sure that it would have. It’s exciting to, well, get excited about this Cavs season (especially with our fair city’s other active team in the state that it’s in), but there wasn’t any major or recent move to celebrate. Mo Williams’ return to Cleveland is nice, and Richard Jefferson looks to be a useful player, but those moves don’t hold even a candlestick to getting LeBron back, trading for Kevin Love, or extending Kyrie Irving. Last year’s Wine and Gold meeting was a celebration. Once the whooping of Tristan’s return settled down, this one was more of a business conference.

After some less than scintillating entertainment,³ the aforementioned Cavs panel took the stage. Some of their discussion was cringe-inspiring jokes — I jotted SOOO BAAAD down in my notebook twice — but much of it was worthwhile, if a touch boilerplate.

David Griffin doesn’t strike me as the most domineering personality, but when he spoke, the room listened. He won the crowd over, not that he needed to, with jokes about exceeding an unlimited budget that both understated his work and emphasized how much money Dan Gilbert has and will continue to spend on this team; the latter point was made quite clear. He established and re-established his credibility with every topic that came up. Any question that was raised, Griffin was prepared to answer. I suppose this doesn’t sound like much — Breaking: Man Is Knowledgable About Occupation — but one look down Lou Groza Boulevard is enough to indicate that it shan’t be taken for granted when it comes to a team executive in Cleveland.

Griffin seems like he’d be a good man to work for, too. While discussing last year’s trade to get Timofey Mozgov, Griffin shouted out the Cavs’ salary cap specialists for finding ways to make the math work and the scouting department for identifying a player worth pursuing. I’m no management expert, but I believe sharing success and dispensing public praise are good things for a superior to do. Perhaps there’s a cold SOB under those glasses and that receding ginger mane, but he can put on quite the warm front.

Gilbert, Griffin, and company were vaguely contrite Wednesday. Gilbert said that last year’s franchise was marked too much by BIRGing: basking in reflected glory.⁴ By acquiring Kevin Love and especially by signing two-time champion LeBron, Gilbert intimated that the Cavs felt the satisfaction of successes that they had not yet earned. That isn’t to say that a false sense of achievement was why the Cavs lost in the Finals. The team that limped into Game 2 in Oakland stood precious little chance against the Warriors, and Griffin acknowledged as much. He rightly called the 2014-15 Warriors a historically good team, and one that made the most of its opportunities. We can kvetch all we want about injuries and luck, but competing for a title starts with having a really, really good team.

The Cavs have one of those now and they know it. They didn’t know what they had for much of last season. Dion Waiters was traded after a couple months. Shawn Marion and Mike Miller never quite fit in. LeBron played chunks of the season like he was wearing white gloves. Anderson Varejao went down, and Timofey Mozgov came over. They were great once the moves were all done and the rotation fell into place — 32-3 in the last 35 games that LeBron, Love, and Irving played together — but shortly thereafter Love and Irving were lost to injury. It was a basketball season driven by a 16-year-old learning stick shift.

The Cavs know they’re good, but now the rest of the league does, too. For a while after the new-look Cavs hit their stride last season, Griffin said they snuck up on teams a bit. It wasn’t that the Cavs were good, but how. Griffin said they retooled their pick and roll defense to better accommodate Mozgov, introducing a new wrinkle with which foes were not familiar. Now that opponents have had a whole summer to review the tape and work at the chalkboard, they’ll have a better idea of how to attack the Cavs. It’s up to David Blatt’s team to come right back at them.

Griffin and Gilbert emphasized that the franchise has its eyes on the end of the season more than the beginning. There’s no way to completely prevent injuries, but the Cavs are doing what they can to reduce their likelihood. Griffin said that there’s no scheduled date for Kyrie Irving’s return for a reason; “Don’t play until you’re ready,” the GM said. He added — in an aside about the myriad ways he’s spending Danny’s war bucks — that the Cavs have invested in sleep studies and are using their resources to mine every possible advantage. He spoke of the team’s depth as one of its greatest attributes, and said that they would go nine- or ten-deep in order to preserve the starters. The Cavs very reasonably believe that this is their best roster yet, and they intend to keep it in the best working condition they can.

One word that Griffin says the Cavs will not be using any time soon: Championship. It was said more than a couple times Wednesday, and it takes no great intellect to understand why. That’s the one and only goal for the season. Every piece is in place. The East, even if improved, is begging to be run over.

“We have something we need to deliver on,” Griffin said. “This is the last time we’re going to say the word ‘championship’ until we deliver one.”

From the top down, the Cavs are not shying away from the pressure of championship expectations. This season isn’t about taking it one game at a time. It isn’t about incremental improvement or developing young talent. It isn’t about learning how to win. It isn’t about getting that one last piece or learning how to play together. They have the players they need. They have the infrastructure in place. They have the goal in front of them.

There’s only one thing left to do.

1. The lines were long for everything Wednesday night — food, drinks, apparel. They were orderly yet disorganized, forming disparately and coming together at odd angles. It was an excellent event if you enjoy geometry. [↩]
2. Nate Forbes and John Boehner; which orange is oranger? [↩]
3. I trust that Michael Conley, the Cavs VP of digital matters, is good at what he does, but he was on stage for too long and had two too many faux phone calls with the Cavs mascots. One gentleman in the crowd yelled at him to stop talking and get off the stage, which was a touch rude but perhaps in line with the room’s opinion. [↩]
4. This is apparently an established term. I would have believed that Gilbert made it up. [↩]